#lambertfield

Something a little different, here’s a Cape Air Cessna 402 heading out from St. Louis Lambert Field. Cape Air was started by Daniel Wolf in 1989 with a single route between Boston and Provincetown on Cape Cod with eight employees, a single aircraft, and 8000 passengers carried in that first year. Today Cape Air has about 93 aircraft serving 43 destinations, many of them under Essential Air Service contract. Carrying over 800,000 passengers daily with over 550 flights, they are the largest independent regional airline in the United States. At St. Louis, Cape Air operates EAS routes to Cape Girardeau, MO, Fort Leonard Wood, MO, Kirksville, MO, Marion, IL, Quincy, IL, and Owensboro, KY. Of the airline’s 93 aircraft, 83 of them are Cessna 402s that seat nine passengers. #Avgeek #CapeAir #Cessna #Cessna402 #N499CA #aviation #aircraft #planeporn #KSTL #STL #LambertField #airport #planespotting #airlines #megaplane #instaplane #instagramaviation #splendid_transport #instaaviation #aviationlovers #aviationphotography #flight #Avgeekery #AvgeekSchoolofKnowledge (at St. Louis Lambert International Airport)

This was the start of a bit of a traffic jam at St. Louis Lambert Field when I was returning home to Dallas from eclipse chasing in southern Illinois. Much to my surprise, there quite a few fellow astronomy enthusiasts on my flight home and while we waited, we were all sharing our photos of the totality and our own experiences with the locations we had chosen to watch the eclipse. I remember back in the 80s and 90s when STL was a beehive of activity as the home base for Ozark and TWA (TWA bought Ozark in 1986). If it weren’t for Southwest, Lambert would be a supremely depressing ghost town. Southwest began service to Lambert in 1985- that year, TWA opened up trans-Atlantic service to London, Paris and Frankfurt from St. Louis. I remember the TWA 747s and L-1011s at the end of one of the concourses back then! That same year, TWA accounted for nearly 57% of the passengers at Lambert. The following year was when TWA bought Ozark and the airport averaged about 20 million passengers a year well into the 1990s. Lambert’s peak came in 2000 just before the TWA acquisition by American Airlines- it was the dominant hub in the TWA network with 515 daily departures and nearly 31 million passengers passed through the airport. Now? It’s a shell of its former self. Southwest has 53% of the passenger load out of the airport and for the last few years the passenger numbers have been just over 6 million/year. #Avgeek #aviation #aircraft #planeporn #KSTL #STL #LambertField #airport #planespotting #airlines #megaplane #instaplane #instagramaviation #Avgeekery #SWApic #Southwest #Boeing #737 #AvGeekSchoolofKnowledge #splendid_transport (at St. Louis Lambert International Airport)